One dollar and eighty-seven cents. That was
all. And sixty cents of it was in pennies. Pennies saved one and two at
a time by
bulldozing
the grocer and the vegetable man and the butcher
until one's cheeks burned with the silent imputation
of parsimony
that such close dealing implied. Three times Della counted it. One dollar
and eighty-seven cents. And the next day would be Christmas.

While the mistress of the home is gradually
subsiding from the first stage to the second, take a look at the home.
A furnished flat at $8 per week. It did not exactly beggar
description, but it certainly had that word on the lookout for the mendicancy
squad.

In the vestibule
below was a letter-box into which no letter would go, and an electric button
from which no mortal finger could coax a ring. Also appertaining
thereunto was a card bearing the name "Mr. James Dillingham Young."

The "Dillingham" had been flung to the breeze
during a former period of prosperity when its possessor was being paid
$30 per week. Now, when the income was shrunk to $20, though, they were
thinking seriously of contracting to a modest and unassuming D. But whenever
Mr. James Dillingham Young came home and reached his flat above he was
called "Jim" and greatly hugged by Mrs. James Dillingham Young, already
introduced to you as Della. Which is all very good.

Della finished her cry and attended to her
cheeks with the powder rag. She stood by the window and looked out dully
at a gray cat walking a gray fence in a gray backyard. Tomorrow would be
Christmas Day, and she had only $1.87 with which to buy Jim a present.
She had been saving every penny she could for months, with this result.
Twenty dollars a week doesn't go far. Expenses had been greater than she
had calculated. They always are. Only $1.87 to buy a present for Jim. Her
Jim. Many a happy hour she had spent planning for something nice for him.
Something fine and rare and sterling--something just a little bit near
to being worthy of the honor of being owned by Jim.

There was a pier-glass between the windows
of the room. Perhaps you have seen a pier-glass in an $8 flat. A very thin
and very agile person may, by observing his reflection in a rapid sequence
of longitudinal strips, obtain a fairly accurate conception of his looks.
Della, being slender, had mastered the art.

Suddenly she whirled from the window and
stood before the glass. her eyes were shining brilliantly, but her face
had lost its color within twenty seconds. Rapidly she pulled down her hair
and let it fall to its full length.

Now, there were two possessions of the James
Dillingham Youngs in which they both took a mighty pride. One was Jim's
gold watch that had been his father's and his grandfather's. The other
was Della's hair. Had the queen of Sheba lived in the flat across the airshaft,
Della would have let her hair hang out the window some day to dry just
to depreciate Her Majesty's jewels and gifts. Had King Solomon been the
janitor, with all his treasures piled up in the basement, Jim would have
pulled out his watch every time he passed, just to see him pluck at his
beard from envy.

So now Della's beautiful hair fell about
her rippling and shining like a cascade of brown waters. It reached below
her knee and made itself almost a garment for her. And then she did it
up again nervously and quickly. Once she faltered for a minute and stood
still while a tear or two splashed on the worn red carpet.

On went her old brown jacket; on went her
old brown hat. With a whirl of skirts and with the brilliant sparkle still
in her eyes, she fluttered out the door and down the stairs to the street.

"I buy hair," said Madame. "Take yer hat
off and let's have a sight at the looks of it."

Down rippled the brown cascade.

"Twenty dollars," said Madame, lifting the
mass with a practised hand.

"Give it to me quick," said Della.

Oh, and the next two hours tripped by on
rosy wings. Forget the hashed metaphor. She was ransacking the stores for
Jim's present.

She found it at last. It surely had been
made for Jim and no one else. There was no other like it in any of the
stores, and she had turned all of them inside out. It was a platinum fob
chain simple and chaste in design, properly proclaiming its value by substance
alone and not by meretricious ornamentation--as all good things should
do. It was even worthy of The Watch. As soon as she saw it she knew that
it must be Jim's. It was like him. Quietness and value--the description
applied to both. Twenty-one dollars they took from her for it, and she
hurried home with the 87 cents. With that chain on his watch Jim might
be properly anxious about the time in any company. Grand as the watch was,
he sometimes looked at it on the sly on account of the old leather strap
that he used in place of a chain.

When Della reached home her intoxication
gave way a little to prudence and reason. She got out her curling irons
and lighted the gas and went to work repairing the ravages made by generosity
added to love. Which is always a tremendous task, dear friends--a mammoth
task.

Within forty minutes her head was covered
with tiny, close-lying curls that made her look wonderfully like a truant
schoolboy. She looked at her reflection in the mirror long, carefully,
and critically.

"If Jim doesn't kill me," she said to herself,
"before he takes a second look at me, he'll say I look like a Coney Island
chorus girl. But what could I do--oh! what could I do with a dollar and
eighty- seven cents?"

At 7 o'clock the coffee was made and the
frying-pan was on the back of the stove hot and ready to cook the chops.

Jim was never late. Della doubled the fob
chain in her hand and sat on the corner of the table near the door that
he always entered. Then she heard his step on the stair away down on the
first flight, and she turned white for just a moment. She had a habit for
saying little silent prayer about the simplest everyday things, and now
she whispered: "Please God, make him think I am still pretty."

The door opened and Jim stepped in and closed
it. He looked thin and very serious. Poor fellow, he was only twenty-two--and
to be burdened with a family! He needed a new overcoat and he was without
gloves.

Jim stopped inside the door, as immovable
as a setter at the scent of quail. His eyes were fixed upon Della, and
there was an expression in them that she could not read, and it terrified
her. It was not anger, nor surprise, nor disapproval, nor horror, nor any
of the sentiments that she had been prepared for. He simply stared at her
fixedly with that peculiar expression on his face.

Della wriggled off the table and went for
him.

"Jim, darling," she cried, "don't look at
me that way. I had my hair cut off and sold because I couldn't have lived
through Christmas without giving you a present. It'll grow out again--you
won't mind, will you? I just had to do it. My hair grows awfully fast.
Say `Merry Christmas!' Jim, and let's be happy. You don't know what a nice--
what a beautiful, nice gift I've got for you."

"You've cut off your hair?" asked Jim, laboriously,
as if he had not arrived at that patent fact yet even after the hardest
mental labor.

"Cut it off and sold it," said Della. "Don't
you like me just as well, anyhow? I'm me without my hair, ain't I?"

Jim looked about the room curiously.

"You say your hair is gone?" he said, with
an air almost of idiocy.

"You needn't look for it," said Della. "It's
sold, I tell you--sold and gone, too. It's Christmas Eve, boy. Be good
to me, for it went for you. Maybe the hairs of my head were numbered,"
she went on with sudden serious sweetness, "but nobody could ever count
my love for you. Shall I put the chops on, Jim?"

Out of his trance Jim seemed quickly to wake.
He enfolded his Della. For ten seconds let us regard with discreet scrutiny
some inconsequential object in the other direction. Eight dollars a week
or a million a year--what is the difference? A mathematician or a wit would
give you the wrong answer. The magi brought valuable gifts, but that was
not among them. This dark assertion will be illuminated later on.

Jim drew a package from his overcoat pocket
and threw it upon the table.

"Don't make any mistake, Dell," he said,
"about me. I don't think there's anything in the way of a haircut or a
shave or a shampoo that could make me like my girl any less. But if you'll
unwrap that package you may see why you had me going a while at first."

White fingers and nimble tore at the string
and paper. And then an ecstatic scream of joy; and then, alas! a quick
feminine change to hysterical tears and wails, necessitating the immediate
employment of all the comforting powers of the lord of the flat.

For there lay The Combs--the set of combs,
side and back, that Della had worshipped long in a Broadway window. Beautiful
combs, pure tortoise shell, with jewelled rims--just the shade to wear
in the beautiful vanished hair. They were expensive combs, she knew, and
her heart had simply craved and yearned over them without the least hope
of possession. And now, they were hers, but the tresses that should have
adorned the coveted adornments were gone.

But she hugged them to her bosom, and at
length she was able to look up with dim eyes and a smile and say: "My hair
grows so fast, Jim!"

And them Della leaped up like a little singed
cat and cried, "Oh, oh!"

Jim had not yet seen his beautiful present.
She held it out to him eagerly upon her open palm. The dull precious metal
seemed to flash with a reflection of her bright and ardent spirit.

"Isn't it a dandy, Jim? I hunted all over
town to find it. You'll have to look at the time a hundred times a day
now. Give me your watch. I want to see how it looks on it."

Instead of obeying, Jim tumbled down on the
couch and put his hands under the back of his head and smiled.

"Dell," said he, "let's put our Christmas
presents away and keep 'em a while. They're too nice to use just at present.
I sold the watch to get the money to buy your combs. And now suppose you
put the chops on."

The magi, as you know, were wise men--wonderfully
wise men--who brought gifts to the Babe in the manger. They invented the
art of giving Christmas presents. Being wise, their gifts were no doubt
wise ones, possibly bearing the privilege of exchange in case of duplication.
And here I have lamely related to you the uneventful chronicle of two foolish
children in a flat who most unwisely sacrificed for each other the greatest
treasures of their house. But in a last word to the wise of these days
let it be said that of all who give gifts these two were the wisest. O
all who give and receive gifts, such as they are wisest. Everywhere they
are wisest. They are the magi.